The gadgetry and fight scenes are nicely rendered. The aeronautical battles, though, fall well short of state-of-the-art. Maybe they're collateral damage to the film's goofy style.

By the end of their arduous journey, Lore and her siblings are changed. But it's the kind of change that will take years, perhaps generations, to understand, to heal.

Floats before your eyes like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The surprise is that, fitted together, these pieces make a completed picture.

Wondrously emotional film, one that sneakily dismantles your defenses and purges grief you didn't realize you had.

Sweet, poignant, and winningly evocative of the period, though occasionally dogged by predictable scenarios and caricatures.

A riveting remake of a pretty terrific 1957 western about manhood, fatherhood and honor.

A seven-word review: Very good performances. Much too much weather.

A Monster Calls is an engrossing tragic fantasy, sustained by genuine sentiment.

Brannaman is a fascinating character, but Buck is so tightly focused that only avid horse lovers will find it appealing.

This gory horror romp is a goofball medley of "Dawn of the Dead," "28 Days Later" . . . , and Monty Python-style severed-limbs/blood-spurting sicko comedy.

For two hours I felt like a kitten chasing an elusive ball of catnip that remained just beyond my paw.

A small, quiet film that walks tall and resonates long after.

If Edel's Oscar-nominated film drags in its final 40 minutes, it's a function of the director's fidelity to the facts - and the fact that the founding trio (and the film's stars) have become prisoners of the state, confined and confused.

Bill Condon's screen adaptation of the 1981 Broadway sensation is, if possible, as dazzling and energizing as its source.

Exhilarating, breathless, must-see chronicle of the skateboarder revolution and evolution.

Flight is neither a simple story of heroism, nor one of a fallen hero. Things are more complex than that - and it is its complexities that make the film all the more rewarding an experience.

The talented Hansen-Love, with clarity and economy, manages to avoid the maudlin.

Not an easy movie to watch.

A Very Long Engagement is "Cold Mountain" with French people.

Despite Scorsese's efforts to pump up some drama - the director, with his signature glasses and Groucho brows, gets huffy about not receiving a set list - drama is sorely lacking. This is just a concert film.

Gripping, sobering, inspiring stuff.

Cartel Land offers a chilling glimpse into a world of violence and vigilantism.

Explosively exciting film.

The real joy of Tyler Measom and Justin Weinstein's documentary is not the copious amount of file footage - such as clips from The Tonight Show when Johnny Carson could still smoke at his desk on camera - or Randi's inherent charisma, or even his acts of escape and magic. No, it's his relationship with his partner of 25 years, Jose Alvarez.

There's real joy in O'Day's eyes - and larynx - as she bobs and weaves through an amazing songbook.

Zany screwball farce.

The most amazing thing about 1936's After the Thin Man is not that it remains a sparkling, engaging entertainment almost 70 years after its release, but that it is nearly as good as 1934's The Thin Man, the first movie based on Dashiell Hammett's husband-and-wife detective team of Nick and Nora Charles. [06 Aug 2005, p.D07]

It's complicated. And it's fascinating.

How the film plays out, and what happens to the boy and the adults in his company, may prove a revelation, or a disappointment, or something in between. But getting there is thrilling and wondrously strange.

It's fun, exciting, freakish filmmaking.

Brothers is about how people change, how they can rise to an occasion, or sink to one. It's a tale of love and allegiance, of truth and the cruelties that men can bring to bear on one another.

Set exactly a century ago, The Last Station is a droll tragicomedy starring those battling Tolstoys, whose family is unhappy in its own way.

The filmmakers don't bother hammering home a backstory or explaining why David is crazy. They just throw us in the deep end and dazzle us with a series of violent encounters that ends with a deadly chase in a surreal fun house maze of mirrors.

It's hard to feel compassion for these Masters of the Universe. I'm not even sure Chandor wants us to, but if he doesn't, then what's the point?

Deschanel does what she does seemingly without effort, managing to convey Summer's mixed-up messed-upness.

Although Me and You and Everyone We Know requires patience on the part of the viewer - to get past the faux naivete of its grown-up characters, to get past its deadpan arty tone - Miranda July's feature debut is worth the time.

Scott and Davis bring heart-rending sadness and telling detail to their roles, and imbue Secret Lives with something real and true.

The Revenant is exhilarating cinema.

A small, beautiful film exploding with big ideas.

Safe, disturbing and edgy and grounded by Moore's riveting performance, resonates with uncertainty.

The 85-year-old Chilean-born auteur returns this week with his latest directorial attempt, The Dance of Reality, an intensely personal, deeply felt, if at times solipsistic autobiographical work about his childhood in Tocopilla, a seaside town at the edge of the Chilean desert.

A story with a beginning and end but without a middle. Two slices of bread without the sandwich meat, I wrote in my notes.

Ain't no mountain high enough to keep the Funk Brothers from getting to you.

A somber piece of film poetry about men so invested in a rigid notion of honor and revenge they become trapped in an endless loop of violence.

Buscemi has pulled off a deft feat: He doesn't romanticize his characters, but he doesn't condemn them as losers either. They're just people. [25 Oct 1996, p.12]

The vampires in What We Do in the Shadows are symbolic of something else altogether: epic unkemptness.

Wickedly clever nightmare entertainment.

There's an icy chill, a detachment, to A Dangerous Method, too. Of course, there are no talking cockroaches (Naked Lunch), no naked steambath knife fights (Eastern Promises), and that may have something to do with why this all feels so un-Cronenbergian.

Bravo to Brooks for conceiving Mother and for giving Reynolds a role that required her to do something more than merely effervesce. Here Reynolds bubbles, she boils, she exhibits a complex geology of human emotions. Her Mrs. Henderson is the mother of all mothers, and Mother is the mother lode of all comedies. [10 Jan 1997, p.05]

The movie trades in familiar virtual realities. Yet as realized by the gifted director Mamoru Oshii, who imagines cityscapes melting into circuit boards, Ghost in the Shell is where virtual reality meets superrealism. [9 May 1996, p.C4]

Wrenching, poignant, and quietly healing.

It lacks momentum, and thus the propulsion required to rocket it into the movie mythosphere.

A devastatingly funny portrait of a wildly dysfunctional clan, Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums is a movie about how people never really mature in ways that matter.

Mud is steeped in a sense of place, and the people inhabiting it. Southern. Superstitious. Suspenseful. Sublime.

Yet, despite a mesmerizing performance by Gyllenhaal - he's as transfixing as a cobra in a snake charmer's dance - and a terrific turn by Riz Ahmed as an unskilled homeless kid Louis hires as his assistant, Nightcrawler doesn't quite have the satirical smarts that made "Network" a classic.

Catching Fire is bigger, better and broodier than the first film.

The film's humor comes in part from the gap between what Oliver says and what the audience sees.

Giannoli's riotously funny and heartbreaking film follows Marguerite's attempt to stage a solo recital in a grand theater in Paris.

Intermittently hilarious if also interminable.

Takes startling - and startlingly unpleasant - turns. This is not a film with anything approximating a conventional ending.

Sure, there are holes in The Manchurian Candidate, and tenuous coincidences and too-convenient plot devices. But Washington, Schreiber, Streep and company - and Demme - have managed to make all the malevolent machinations seem relevant again.

Greenberg, with Stiller's sad and self-mocking portrait at its core, is well worth getting to know.

Rife with nightmarishly violent and horrific behavior. It's intense, graphic, frightening.

The menagerie of mythological beasties in Narnia don't seem quite genuinely, three-dimensionally real.

Kids for Cash is no-nonsense, no-stone-unturned filmmaking.

Scrupulously made and deeply affectionate.

Ripe with homoeroticism, but also with what the director — who made the film after recovering from a stroke a few years back — calls "the scent of murder."

His (Mamet) direction is unobtrusive, unflashy, and always willing to allow the hilarious cast all the room it needs.

Although Mistress America is very much a New York movie, full of references to couture, pop culture, boutique hotels (to Antigone and Faulkner, too), its comic centerpiece is a brazen assault on a country compound.

Vibrant and vivacious documentary.

Rango is best enjoyed by those over 10 who have an idea of what "existential" means and can appreciate a surreal mashup of "Chinatown," "Gladiator," "High Noon," and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly."

A delightful, oddball surprise.

An English-language remake is in the works, but why wait for the Hollywood knockoff? Easy Money is the real thing: a great gangster pic.

As a movie, Steal is as finely wrought as the decorative ironworks that hang on the walls of the Barnes between Picassos and Seurats. Yet as a narrative of the facts, it is as one-sided as a plaintiff's brief.

Amelie is utterly charming. And so, too, is the film.

In the end, what the movie is about: time and life, and what we do with them, and what we regret that we didn't do.

Suffers from several goofily tacky animated reenactments and a music score that unnecessarily underlines the significance of key events, but for those who lived through the turmoil of Vietnam, and for the generations that have come since, the film is an important document in its own right.

Moves from its protagonist's dream state to her memories to her waking present in imperceptible shifts - the effect is disorienting, at first, but ingenious.

The Trip to Italy doesn't feel entirely new, but there's comfort in familiarity, too. And as Brydon and Coogan note in one discourse, it's the rare sequel (The Godfather: Part II) that's better than its forebear.

Lord knows how Holofcener got the performance she did out of Goodwin, but the child actor's Annie, rude and unmanageable, is an extraordinarily rich and complicated figure.

A really satisfying suspenser, but also really, really fun.

The performances are uniformly strong - nuanced, realistic, lacking any wild, flailing emoting.

Opens the window on a pivotal time in 1960s (and early 1970s) pop culture.

Been there, done that. As thrilling a filmmaker as Martin Scorsese continues to be, and as wild a performance as Leonardo DiCaprio dishes up as its morally bankrupt master of the universe, The Wolf of Wall Street seems almost entirely unnecessary.

Whatever one makes of its subject's moral code and mind-set, one has to give Terror's Advocate its due: the stories are riveting, the man is real.

Americans seem uncommonly uncomfortable discussing our own class struggles. But, boy, do we love to watch the Brits do it. I think that's one reason the inspiring and joyful Dark Horse is such an appealing film.

Muscle Shoals isn't perfect. Neither Bono nor Alicia Keyes has any business being in the movie, though Bono does wax poetic about the genius of the music recorded there, and Keyes teams with the Swampers for a strong performance of Dylan's "Pressing On."

The same kind of keen, empathetic observations that made "The Station Agent" and "The Visitor" so illuminating are at play here, too.

Clean, director Olivier Assayas' spellbinding study of a junkie trying to get her life in order so she can reclaim custody of her child, avoids the pitfalls, brilliantly.

Croupier, immersed in a world of gambling, gamesmanship and crime, is a solid, seductive entertainment.

He (Irving) has been able to capture the quirky tone of the popular novel.

Girl on the Bridge, with its doomed art-house romanticism and echoes of Fellini, may not be the deepest piece of filmmaking out there now, but it is easily the most intoxicating. Take the leap.

A gorgeous, gory epic, is a blow-your-mind masterpiece about the emperor who ruled more than 2,000 years ago.

So electric are the performances in The Crucible, so breathtaking is director Nicholas Hytner's darting camera, that it was fully halfway into Arthur Miller's screen adaptation of his legendary drama before I noticed something missing. Namely, a subtext. [20 Dec 1996, p.03]

Wildly sad, funny and terrific documentary.

Weirdly funny, inspiring film.

Like many Apatow films, Bridesmaids has a rambling, disjointed quality, crammed with sequences that elicit laughs without advancing plot.

Assembles varied and remarkable digital video, archival footage, photographs, interviews and personal reflections and academics' perspectives to convey the scope and history of the Tibetan story.